The invention is generally directed to location tracking, and in particular to the tracking of individuals within physical spaces, e.g., customers within a retail establishment. The invention is also directed to manners of applying electronically-readable tags to individuals and sensing the locations of such tags.
Consumer-oriented marketing and sales have become significantly more sophisticated since the days of mom and pop retail establishments. Significant research has been devoted to improving the efficiency of retail establishments through improved store layouts, product placements, product displays and point of sale advertisements, all of which have been found to impact sales. As an example, grocery stores have for many years put staple items such as milk and bread in the rear part of a store so that customers will need to walk through much of the store to get those items, and hopefully find other items for purchase on the way. Similarly, grocery stores often organize product displays to locate complimentary items (e.g., ice cream and ice cream cones) close to one another so that customers are encouraged to purchase those complimentary items.
Retail enterprises have also expended significant efforts in improving the overall shopping experience of their customers, as customers that enjoy shopping in a particular store are more likely to buy more products and to return for future visits. Poor experiences such as long lines at the checkout register, crowded aisles, bottlenecks, unfriendly sales staff, etc. detract from the overall shopping experience, and may hurt sales. In addition, the flow of customers through an establishment can raise some safety issues particularly if customers crowd in particular locations of a store.
An efficiently run retail enterprise tends to have more repeat customers, higher revenues and thus, greater profits. Therefore, a continuing need exists for monitoring store efficiency and performance so that problems can be identified and improvements implemented. One type of data that is believed to be helpful in analyzing store performance relates to the flow of customers throughout a store, e.g., where customers are at any given time, how long they stay in the store, how long they linger in certain areas of a store, how quickly they move between areas, etc. Such information is believed to have a number of uses, e.g., in determining marketing effectiveness, traffic flow, safety issues, etc. However, to date the logging of such information is difficult and manually intensive.
For example, it would be possible to track customer location data by positioning workers in different locations in a store, and having those workers log the number of customers coming and going in their area. Perhaps more efficiently, the video surveillance systems utilized by security personnel in many stores could be used to collect customer location data; however, a person would still be required to monitor the security cameras and manually log customer information. Moreover, the movement of individual customers would be difficult, if not impossible, to track in many instances.
Anytime an individual is involved in logging information such as location information, human error is introduced, as is relatively high labor cost. It would be extremely desirable to automate the task of logging customer location information in a retail establishment; however, existing technologies are not readily adapted to gathering customer location for the purposes discussed above.
For example, location tracking devices have been used in a number of environments outside of retail establishments to track objects, animals and people. For example, radio transmitters have been used to track wild animals, and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices have been used to track a wide variety of entities, e.g., service fleet vehicles.
The various known location tracking devices, however, have a number of limitations that limit their usefulness in tracking the customers of retail establishments. First, customers would typically need to be given dedicated electronic devices to carry as the customers browse through a store. Requiring customers to carry devices, however, is obtrusive, and could potentially offend some customers. Moreover, individual devices would be relatively expensive, introducing a risk of theft, and likely limiting the total number of customers that could be tracked at any given instance.
Therefore, a need still exists for an automated manner of tracking location of customers within a retail establishment, and in particular, for a customer tracking system that is less expensive, more reliable and less obtrusive than could be implemented using conventional tracking technology.
The invention addresses these and other problems associated with the prior art by providing a location tracking system for individuals that is capable of being used in a number of environments, including in retail or other commercial environments, to track the movements of customers in an automated fashion. The location tracking system may utilize electronically-readable tags formed of magnetic composition and applied to individuals"" footwear, with the magnetic composition encoded with a unique code for each individual. Through the sensing of the tags with magnetic sensors disposed at one or more sensor locations, specific individuals may often be tracked in a reliable, unobtrusive and cost effective manner.
Therefore, consistent with one aspect of the invention, a unique electronic tagging method and apparatus are provided for applying an electronically-readable tag to an individual. The electronically-readable tag is comprised of a magnetic composition that is applied to an individual""s footwear, and magnetized with an electronically-readable code.
Consistent with another aspect of the invention, a unique location tracking method and apparatus are provided for determining an electronically-readable code from a magnetic composition applied to an individual""s footwear and sensed by a magnetic sensor.
Consistent with still another aspect of the invention, a method and apparatus are provided for tracking customers in an establishment. A plurality of customers are tagged when they enter the establishment, and each is assigned a unique electronically-readable code. The location of each electronically-tagged customer is then tracked using a plurality of proximity sensors disposed at a plurality of locations in the establishment, with each proximity sensor configured to detect the unique electronically-readable code of a customer that is located proximate thereto.
While each of the aforementioned aspects of the invention may have separate utility from the other aspects, when combined these aspects of the invention can provide a relatively robust, inexpensive, reliable and unobtrusive manner of logging customer location and related data in a physical retail environment. Moreover, such data can be used for a variety of useful purposes, e.g., to gauge marketing and advertising effectiveness, traffic flow, safety, architectural design, etc.
These and other advantages and features, which characterize the invention, are set forth in the claims annexed hereto and forming a further part hereof. However, for a better understanding of the invention, and of the advantages and objectives attained through its use, reference should be made to the Drawings, and to the accompanying descriptive matter, in which there is described exemplary embodiments of the invention.